Evening Star
You survived the crash into the Venus Colony, but now you must fix the air leak, and find out what happend to the colonists. Cast * Captain Maxine Myers * Prof. Ellie Maxted * Commander Steven Sissay * Peter Lynneberg Simons Plot Distress Call Peter Simons is unhappy with the situation: he suspects they may have shot down the ship, and they seem to have tampered with airlocks. But Captain Myers doesn't want to make any assumptions, especially since there doesn't seem to be a sign of anyone yet and if there was, someone would have plugged up the massive air leak. The best bet is to head to the Command Hub to use their computer. Quick Time In the welcome lobby on the way to the Hub, you discover a disturbing scene. Furniture overturned, scorch marks on the walls... and piles of dead bodies, bleeding in torn jumpsuits. The bodies look old, and look like they've been murdered. Prof Maxted notices red coral growing, but Captain Myers advises you all steer clear. Yellow Doors In the Command Hub, VR1-ICA informs you that her functionality is at less than 6% so she cannot tell you what happened, or pinpoint the air leak. However, she tells you that you can manually activate the maintenance drones in a nearby sector. Captain Myers tells everyone else to remain in the Hub, and takes you with her to the nearby sector. Up That Ramp Commander Sissay, over comms, tells you that the transmitter tower is damaged, but there is a received signal. None of you understand the strange sound, or the symbols that the video displays, when the signal is played. Captain Myers and you activate the drones, and head to the transmitter tower to try and fix it. Written in Blood Commander Sissay manages to get VR1-ICA back online, and she finds the hull breaches. But she can't fix the structural damage, only keep it together while you wait for a rescue ship. That means you must get a distress call out quickly. In the main garden, as you run towards the tower, you find more violently murdered bodies, and graffiti that reads "Be Reborn". Damaged Area You get the tower back online, but VR1-ICA discovers the dishes are damaged. Luckily, there are spares, so now you'll need to replace them. Very Tough or Very Lucky You fix the tower with Captain Myers, and VR1-ICA realises that the orbital satellite is rigged to send a malware virus to approaching ships: the same one that made your ship crash! While up on the tower, Captain Myers spots someone moving through the colony, but loses them under cover. They aren't just a survivor, but a witness to whatever madness happened here. Transcript CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: All right everyone! We're in a tough situation. Our ship has crashed, leaving a stranded on the floating Venus colony. The colony is running out of air, and if the supply dwindles, it'll smash down through the atmosphere. We must stop that happening! PROF. ELLIE MAXTED: This doesn't make any sense! There are supposed to be 600 people living here! Why haven't they made contact? Why have they left a hull breach untended long enough for things to get this bad? PETER LYNNEBERG SIMONS: Don't forget that business with the airlock professor. None of you are saying it directly, but I will. Someone wired the floor as a booby trap. They wanted to kill us! COMMANDER STEVEN SISSAY: Look, the colony's a large place. Something's clearly gone wrong. If some colonists are injured but some are able to work, they'll be trying to get the colony's main computer online. That's protocol priority one. It's an AI, like the one on our ship. Regulates all repairs scanner and communication systems. PETER LYNNEBERG SIMONS: But what if they're hostile? Maybe they decided they wanted to keep the profits from this expedition for themselves? Maybe they shot down our ship? CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: We are not making any assumptions Mr. Simons. We don't know why this ship came down. PETER LYNNEBERG SIMONS: Well, you say that, but you let Sissay bring extra sidearms! CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: Our mission is still to make contact with the colonists. We do that, repair the station, send a distress call to Earth, THOSE are our goals. The best place to access the main computer is the colony's command hub. That means it's our best chance to find any of the people who live here. The hub is straight down the corridor. Let's go! -- COMMANDER STEVEN SISSAY: Not liking the feel of this place skipper. Flickering lights, dusty floors. The creaking you hear is a definite sign of structural strain. PETER LYNNEBERG SIMONS: This. Isn't. Right. This is the welcome lobby for new arrivals. It's supposed to be polished, clean! PROF. ELLIE MAXTED: It looks like a bomb went off. Overturned chairs and tables. Scorch marks on the walls. COMMANDER STEVEN SISSAY: The big bronze statue. The woman looking up. Is that who I think it is? PETER LYNNEBERG SIMONS: Amelia Spens III. CEO of Pandora Haze. Founder of the space program. They say that she's got a dozen clone bodies back on Earth. She never ages! If she likes an executive's performance, she doubles their lifespan! CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: I'd concentrate on surviving today, Mr. Simons. Look there... under the debris... near the statue? Bodies. PROF. ELLIE MAXTED: Colonists in torn jumpsuits. Bloodstains all around them! I think... I think they were murdered! COMMANDER STEVEN SISSAY: ...while ago, from the smell. Really not liking the vibe skipper. Reminds me of Helsinki after the floods. PROF. ELLIE MAXTED: There's something else here. Growing between the bodies. It looks like... red coral, but no genus I've seen. Blossoming through a crack in the floor! Fascinating! CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: Best not touch a Prof. We don't know what happened here COMMANDER STEVEN SISSAY: Well, it holds in the walls. There was a battle, we know that much. PETER LYNNEBERG SIMONS: The security staff had firearms, but only as a formality. There shouldn't be anyone here to fight! CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: The command hub's are on the ramp we'll find more information there. Quick time, run! -- PETER LYNNEBERG SIMONS: Ah, here we are! The nerve center of the colony. Neural display racks, console ?????, ergonomic chairs, all top-of-the-line. Pandora Haze spent 72 trillion dollars on this place you know. PROF. ELLIE MAXTED: There were more bodies in here captain. Underneath the consoles. At least six. Two had their heads caved in. This one was throttled. The others shot. What happened here? PETER LYNNEBERG SIMONS: Must have happened so fast. Or they could have contacted Pandora Haze for help. COMMANDER STEVEN SISSAY: Computer banks are damaged skipper, but I've seen worse. Reckon I can bypass if you give me a minute. PETER LYNNEBERG SIMONS: Oh. Aren't you supposed to be a pilot, not an engineer? COMMANDER STEVEN SISSAY: Being a lot of things in a lot of different wars, love. VR1-ICA: Hello! I am the VR1-ICA: standard Pandora Haze artificial intelligence. This version of me is installed on the Venus One colony. Please call me Veronica it would help you relax. PETER LYNNEBERG SIMONS: Oh... charming. She sounds a bit more buggy than the one on our ship. CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: Veronica, I'm CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS. Pandora Haze ID eight-three-eight-eight-one. My crew was dispatched to assist this colony. What happened here? Where are the colonists? VR1-ICA: I'm sorry. My systems are in disarray. There's no personal information in my archives. COMMANDER STEVEN SISSAY: The station's losing air Veronica. Can you pinpoint the course? VR1-ICA: Internal ???? functioning at six percent coverage. I cannot verify. The station is equipped with maintenance drones, which could assess the situation. However, I am too damaged to activate them. You would need to do so manually. CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: Where's the nearest drone bay Veronica? VR1-ICA: Station sector 13-A. It is near to your current location. CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: All right. Five with me. We'll head to the drone bay and get the maintenance robots online. The rest of you stay and help Veronica. Scour her archives and find out what's wrong with her comms. And Prof. see if you can find any info the colonists recorded about the local environment. We need to know what we're up against. Five, with me through the yellow doors, into the maintenance tunnel. Come on, run! -- CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: Command hub, this is Myers. Five and I are on the drone bay. It's a storeroom full of crab-shaped robots. More scorch marks on the walls down here. COMMANDER STEVEN SISSAY: Roger that skipper. Veronica says there's an activation panel in the corner of the room. CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: Yeah, got it! Bringing them online now. This reminds me of home. I was a slum kid in Chicago Five back before America fell. Used to carjack from rich neighborhoods. Their security robots looked a lot like this. COMMANDER STEVEN SISSAY: Captain, Veronica says her communication systems can't broadcast because her transmitter towers damaged. But, we've found the single received signal stored in her databanks. CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: Well, let's hear it commander. That's... reassuring. What language is it? COMMANDER STEVEN SISSAY: We don't know. Not an earth language anyway. There's an image stream with the audio but it's just... random symbols. Might be encrypted. I'm going over it with my old cipher??? Prof. wants to take a look too. Apparently, she speaks 37 languages. Impressive woman. CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: The robots are powered up Steve, they're moving out. Where's the transmitter tower? Five and I can assess the situation while the drones look for hull bridges. COMMANDER STEVEN SISSAY: Checking. There's an access tunnel to your left. You can follow into the colony's main garden area. The towers are in the middle of that. CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: You heard him five, we need to get a distress call out. On that ramp as fast as you can run! -- CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: Command, Five and I are in the colony's main garden area. It's like a massive city park, surrounded by grey buildings, trees, grass, an artificial lake. We can see the dome over our heads, and.... ah. There are more bodies here. A lot more. On the grass and in the lake, dozens of them. All violent deaths, best we can tell. PROF. ELLIE MAXTED: We're watching you, captain. The commander's got some of Veronica's internal cameras working. COMMANDER STEVEN SISSAY: Seeing the same in image feeds across the colony. Bodies on the deck. Lots of wounds from bullets. Blunt force trauma or improvised blades. PROF. ELLIE MAXTED: They did this to each other. VR1-ICA: Captain. My drones have restored the air recyclers. They've also discovered multiple hole breaches. There were certainly fighting within a station. Makeshift munitions destroyed the reactor and cracked the dome in several places. I can stabilize the air supply, but the structural damage exceeds my capacity to address. PETER LYNNEBERG SIMONS: Veronica might be able to hold the station together until it rescue ship arrives, but only if we get the word out soon. PROF. ELLIE MAXTED: This doesn't make sense! These people were scientists, administrators, engineers. They had children. Why would they turn on each other like this? CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: Your guess is as good as mine Prof. There is graffiti on that gazebo Five, written in blood? "Be reborn"? Whatever that means. Ahh.. there is a transmitter tower. That big black spike with dishes on top? Let's go. The sooner we find out what's needed to repair it the sooner we get a message home. Come on, run! -- CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: Command hub? Five and I are in the comm tower. It's pretty cramped in here. Lots of consoles, all offline. Five, flip those switches. VR1-ICA: Thank you, captain. I am now connected to the transmitter tower. The tower is designed to broadcast messages to an orbital satellite, which relays them to Earth. Diagnostics indicate the dishes at the side of the tower are damaged. COMMANDER STEVEN SISSAY: Must be nice to be a computer. How can you sound so calm about all of this Veronica? VR1-ICA: I am extremely concerned commander, but my emotional responses are designed to award utility. My focus is on helping those of you who remain. There are backup transmitter dishes near the door. Please, take two to the side of the tower and splice them in. CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: That's a stairway to a damaged area five, 2,000 steps. Pass me a dish, and no time to lose. Run! -- CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: Glad you made it up Five. Sorry to rush ahead! Veronica, I've spliced in one dish. Five if you click yours in there and turn that power ray on... You can see the whole colony from up here! Then main garden, all the great buildings around it. The dome, overhead! But no signs of life. Just hundreds of bodies in the streets. VR1-ICA: Captain, I have made contact with the orbital satellite. It appears to have been sabotaged. It has been reprogrammed to send any approaching vessel a malware virus that will cause it to crash. COMMANDER STEVEN SISSAY: That's what destroyed our ship and we can't come back to Earth for help. This is crazy! They'll kill each other and booby-trapped the planet before they died. Why would anyone do that? CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: They didn't all die. Five, look down there. Movement between those buildings! Damn! I've lost it undercover. That was a person Five. That was definitely a human being. We are not the only ones on this colony! There is a survivor down there. It looks like the only one. PETER LYNNEBERG SIMONS: What kind of person survives a massacre like this? CAPTAIN MAXINE MYERS: Someone very tough or very lucky. Either way, they saw this place go mad. They are not just a survivor; they're a witness. Whoever they are, we have to find them. Codex Artefact Scan of Mysterious Coral Your space suit has automatically scanned the strange coral identified by Professor Maxted. So far, all readings are inconclusive. Broken Guitar Part of a broken guitar, found near a bloody body. This colonist must have been practising their music when whatever tragedy struck. They were under the graffiti reading Be Reborn in the garden area. Category:Mission Category:New Adventures